'Outsider' status helps Ball create complicated films

Being gay has its obvious political and social drawbacks in mainstream America, but for telling "straight" stories on film, it can be a huge asset.

Ask Alan Ball, the unapologetically gay Oscar-winning screenwriter of the 1999 Oscar-winning best picture "American Beauty."

"In a general sense, you have a little bit more of a critical eye," the 51-year-old, Atlanta-born filmmaker said. "You are outside of mainstream society. I think an outsider's eye is really healthy for a writer. I think our society is full of all kinds of contradictions and hypocrisies and things one might not see if one were right in the middle of the mainstream."

Ball has directed his first feature film, "Towelhead," based on the novel by Alicia Erian. The drama details the experiences of an adolescent girl named Jasira, struggling with newfound sexual feelings at the same time she deals with her identity as the daughter of a Lebanese father and white American mother.

"When I was 13 and I was struggling with sexuality, I was beginning to have these feelings and attractions and feeling like they were wrong. I shouldn't be having these. I must keep them a secret. I was feeling really tortured about it," Ball said. "So I think it was really easy for me to empathize with Jasira."

Jasira is played by young actress Summer Bishil, the daughter of an American mother and Lebanese father. Her astonishing performance is a transparent look into Jasira's soul, a complex meld of lusty curiosity, emerging womanhood and blank-slate naiveté. Like Mena Suvari's teenage girl in "American Beauty," Jasira becomes flattered by the creepy advances from a middle-aged man, here a too-friendly neighbor and U.S. Army reservist played by Aaron Eckhart.

So, Mr. Ball, what's this thing with you, middle-aged men and young girls?

Ball has heard the question many times.

"I think it's a way to explore that (young and older attraction) dynamic without making it a story about a young boy, which then just becomes narcissistic," Ball explained. "It would be about me and my personal mythology. Intuitively, I know what this girl is feeling, and I understand why she is doing this really stupid thing."

Yet, people in real life do the stupid things depicted in "Towelhead."

"And the story doesn't judge them. Alicia's book doesn't judge them," Ball said. "It also didn't tell you what to feel. I loved that! I love for something to engage me, and for me to have a visceral response, but I don't want to be told exactly what I'm supposed to feel. I don't want the movie to live my experience for me. I don't want the music to announce, this is saaaaad.

"I think so many movies are these passive experiences. You just sit there while these spectacles roll right over you. I see so many movies where I feel insulted. Hey, I knew that! You didn't have to hammer it in like that! I don't think the moviegoing public is as stupid as the people who make the movies think they are."

Ball views corporate media consolidation as the single greatest threat to a healthy moviemaking community.

"Paramount Vantage closed. Warner Independent closed. So many studios are closing their smaller, more independent arms," he said. "It means for me, as a filmmaker, that the kind of movies I like to make - which are thoughtful, complicated and intended for adults - are becoming harder and harder to make."

"Towelhead" (the title comes from a derisive term for people of Arabic ancestry) is indeed thoughtful and complicated. There are no traditional Hollywood heroes, villains and victims.

Some viewers might be confused, even angry, that "Towelhead" finds humanity in all its characters, even the sexually abusive ones.

That's a good thing according to Ball, who prefers hues of gray to stark, easily pegged black-and-white situations.

"I think the danger in the more simplified, black-and-white versions is that it allows us to look the other way," Ball said. "It couldn't be the soccer coach, he's such a friendly guy. She genuinely likes him! There can't be anything bad going on. But that's where it happens."

Ball said he really respected his cast, especially Eckhart and Peter Macdissi, who plays Jasira's dad, a materialistic, self-centered Lebanese-American who scrambles to do every superficial thing he can to prove his patriotism.

"Actors are tricky when it comes to playing characters who do unlikeable things," Ball said. "A lot of them need to wink at the camera to let us know that 'I'm not really that bad.'

"Both Peter and Aaron are not that insecure as actors. They fully inhabit those people and find the humanity in them and they let them be themselves in all their messy glory."